Richard Feynman's Method of Learning Anything

Richard P. Feynman was arguably one of the most brilliant, iconoclastic and influential minds of the post-war generation. Albert Einstein attended Feynman’s first talk as a graduate student, and Bill Gates was so inspired by his pedagogy that he called Feynman, “the greatest teacher I never had.” His work helping understand the interaction of light and matter earned him a Nobel Prize in 1965.

Known for his knack of combining different strands of knowledge and explaining complex concepts with wit and clarity, Feynman redefined how people thought about physics. When he wasn’t researching particle physics, he was writing, dabbling in the arts, sketching or playing the bongo.

Richard Feynman’s quote "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." is as applicable to careers as to life. That is why we must continually ask ourselves tough questions every 3 months.

1. Are we solving a problem or inventing a problem to solve?

2. Are we creating an impact or pretending to do so? Impact can be social, financial, business, technical or creative but it must be measurable. If we can’t quantify our impact, we must be able to visualize a stakeholder or a shareholder whose life we made marginally better through our work. Not being able to quantify impact or visualize a shareholder/stakeholder is a red flag.

3. What are we doing consciously or unconsciously to fool ourselves. What uncomfortable conversations are we unwilling to have? What information are we conveniently ignoring.

Resume Values vs Eulogy Values

Cultural commentator David Brooks talks about two different virtues - resume and eulogy. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful.

Resume-driven people often give answers that sound like concatenation of buzzwords. Impact-driven people give clear answers because their motivation is intrinsic. They are driven by solving problems creatively as opposed to preparing to solve problems one fine day when all chips fall in place. Truth be told, all chips never fall in place.We need to start small, dream big and most importantly live in the present.

The only thing we can do is to strengthen how we learn, focus on selecting the right set of problems and partner with long-term people.

“The Feynman Technique”: War on Buzzwords

Let us now dive into his iconic mental model tool to convey complicated information concisely. It is now popularly called “The Feynman Technique”.

Turns out that the technique from Feynman’s studying methods when he was a student at Princeton where he started to record and connect the dots between what he knew and what he wanted to learn without fooling himself.

This is the four-step process you can apply to learn quickly and efficiently.

1. Identify what you want to learn

This boils down to writing down key questions you have about the subject or topic.

2. Teach it to a child

If you can teach a concept to a child, you understand it. If you can’t, you don’t.

Write down everything you know about the subject. Key is to write simply in a way that a child can understand. Obviously, the idea is not to dumb down content or be simplistic in our approach. The goal is to remove the fluff and jargon. You also need to be brief. Children have small attention span so you need to train yourself to convey want you want without inflicting unnecessary words.

3. Identify your knowledge gaps

This is when you understand the known and unknown unknowns. Addressing these knowledge gaps sets us on the path to truly understanding a subject.

4. Organize your thoughts and tell a story

“All things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.”

With this sentence, even if you don’t understand anything about Physics, you will vividly remember that everything is made up of atoms. In one sentence, Feynman explains the foundational existence of our universe both to a child and a physics expert.

This simple technique can help you keep it simple and be honest to yourself. Isn’t that simply another way to not fool yourself despite the temptation?

Afterthought: “Business opportunities are like buses, there's always another one coming.” – Richard Branson.

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